Best Car Features on the Christmas List

Best Car Features on the Christmas List

Christmas is almost here. It’s the time of year when tired copywriters slap together hackneyed seasonal frames for their blog posts. So, without further ado, here are the top five new car features you need to put on your Christmas list.

OnStar 4G LTE WiFi

While you white knuckle down an icy Highway 1 on the way to Gam Gam’s house for Christmas, your kids want to recline and stream Paw Patrol, or trade bitcoin on their iPads. Well, that’s easy thanks to OnStar 4G LTE WiFi. Standard on many new GM vehicles (often with a temporary, free subscription), WiFi lets you connect as many as ten devices to surf the web and stream music, movies, and audiobooks.

While you try to tell the difference between black ice and black pavement in the black night, at least your kids won’t be yelling at you.

Need For Low-Speed Automatic Forward Braking

What is low-speed automatic braking? If your vehicle detects an imminent forward collision while driving at a low speed, your vehicle will automatically brake. This will reduce the severity of a collision and can even avoid certain collisions entirely. If you’ve ever had someone suddenly pull out in front of you (that is to say, if you’ve ever driven, anywhere), you’ll understand why this feature is on the Christmas list.

IntelliBeam Headlamps

Listen, I love being blinded by strangers on the highway as much as the next guy. Wait, I don’t love that, and neither does the next guy. Fortunately, IntelliBeam Headlamps can sense traffic and will turn your high beams off the avoid blinding people on the road! They’re not just the future; they’re an available feature in most new GM vehicles.

It makes your life easier because you don’t have to keep switching your high beams on and off manually. More importantly, when other drivers have intelligent high beams, they won’t obnoxiously blind you (unless they have lazily installed HID headlights, but that’s a different subject)! I guess I would actually prefer if this feature was on everyone else’s Christmas list instead of my own…

Heated Steering Wheel

I don’t really need to explain this one, do I? A heated steering wheel is a steering wheel that heats up. It feels good on your hands when it’s cold. I don’t know what else to tell you.

Surround Vision

This is Saskatchewan, a province in which 93% of people drive full-size pickup trucks. I made that statistic up, (69% of vehicle purchases in Canada are light trucks!) but you get the point. We have a lot of large vehicles, and our parking lots, alleys, and downtown centres often leave us with little space. Maybe you’re the Da Vinci of parking, but for the rest of us less-Vitruvian men, a little bit of parking assistance is a good thing. Enter Surround Vision – one of the coolest car features currently available.

Surround Vision uses cameras to help eliminate blind spots when driving. If that sounds like a regular backup camera, you’re right. But I haven’t got to the black magic part yet. Surround Vision uses multiple cameras located all around the vehicle and stitches the images together. It’s sort of like the “panorama” feature on your smartphone. Except Surround Vision builds the image in real time, meaning that you can see a bird’s-eye view of your vehicle and the surrounding area. That makes parking and trailer guiding a snap (“a snap” is old people language for easy.

What vehicle features are at the top of your Christmas list? Oil slicks and an ejector seat?